Getting "In Your Face": Strategies for Encouraging Creativity, Engagement and Investment When the Museum is Offline

Abstract

In 2007 the Art
Gallery of Ontario (http://www.ago.net) closed its doors temporarily to complete the renovation and installation of a new Frank
Gehry-designed facility. In the months leading up to this closure, the Gallery
experimented with different ways to keep people connected to the institution.
One of the most high profile programs to emerge during this time was the
exhibition In Your Face that began with a call for submission asking the public to send in
postcard-sized portraits.

The response to
this project was unprecedented and resulted in the AGO receiving over 17,000
portraits that were initially presented within a gallery space normally
reserved for blockbuster exhibitions. The success of this endeavor led the AGO
to experiment with various on-line presentations of similar content that
further demonstrated that museums can function as catalytic agents when open to
experimenting with a combination of innovative programming and on-line access.

The success of In
Your Face also attracted
the attention of the Portrait Gallery of Canada (http://www.portraits.gc.ca),
a public gallery without a permanent home, and resulted in a partnership that
made it possible for the exhibition to be re-mounted in Ottawa, and made it
accessible to a national audience. Tracing the evolution of In Your Face through its various forms of presentation
and partnership, this paper examines issues of significance to museums and
galleries as their relationship to the public is forced to evolve in response
to changing circumstances, including those times when collections may be
inaccessible and the building itself is offline.

Introduction

The face of Canada is changing. Of the 33,000,000 people in Canada,
nearly 20% identify themselves as immigrants, and an equal number have
indicated that their mother tongue is a language other than English or French.
In Toronto, half of the population identifies as having been born outside of
Canada, and as many as 150 different languages are spoken every day. For public
institutions like the Art Gallery of Ontario, this stimulating and rich
environment brings with it many challenges but also incredible opportunities (http://www.statcan.ca/).

In addition to these demographic shifts, the way people access
information, spend their leisure time and interact with each other continues to
evolve as the world becomes increasingly wired. Globally, Canada ranks among
the top 20 countries in terms of the percentage of the population that uses the
Internet. Canada ranks even higher in terms of broadband penetration and,
within this context, Toronto has been referred to as the social media capital of North
America and the Facebook capital of the world (http://www.internetworldstats.com/).

The proliferation of new forms of collectively created knowledge
(Wikipedia), the popularity of Web sites featuring user generated content
(Flickr, You Tube), and the emergence of social media platforms (My Space,
Facebook) have turned traditional notions of expertise, cultural production and
public space upside down. With the evolution of technologies that make it
possible for people to share their knowledge, creativity and experience in new and
novel ways, the old divisions between expert and enthusiast, producer and
consumer, public and private, have blurred irrevocably. As contemporary culture
plays itself out on-line, it is fascinating to see how museums and galleries
are responding to the challenge.

In response to these changes, the Art Gallery of Ontario created the
exhibition In Your Face and a complementary project, Collection X, both
offering compelling examples of what can happen when a public gallery has an
opportunity to experiment with programming. It involved a transparent process,
a flexible structure, and an entirely open-ended outcome. The result was the
emergence of an alternative programming model that privileged creativity and
participation and, as a result, fostered new levels of audience engagement,
public involvement and professional partnerships.

In Your Face at the Art Gallery of Ontario

In 2006, when the
AGO was beginning a major reconstruction and reinstallation project, the
organization made the decision to launch a community-generated exhibition
called In Your Face –
The People’s Portrait Project. Public programmer Gillian McIntyre and
interpretive planner David Wistow had collaborated before on two experimental
interventions in the Degas (2003) and Modigliani (2004) exhibitions, where the
public was invited to create art in the exhibition space. One of the things
learned from these interventions was how engaged visitors were with content
produced by other visitors. Inspired by these examples, the planners built on
their experiences to design In Your Face, an exhibition created entirely by and for the public.

At the heart of In
Your Face was a public call
for submission that went out through newspapers, via e-mail and on the AGO’s
Web site. Members of the public were asked to submit postcard-size portraits in
the media of their choice. The only criteria were that portraits had to measure
4” x 6”, be an original work of art, and be accompanied by a signed consent
form. From the outset, the
decision had been made that the portraits would not be judged and there would
be no limit to how many could be submitted.

The response to In
Your Face was extraordinary.
By the time the exhibition opened in July 2006, the AGO had received over
10,000 portraits, from across Canada and beyond, in various media, including
drawings, oil paintings, watercolors, encaustic, papier mâché, acrylic, silk
screen, relief print, photos and digitally-based imagery. Packages arrived
containing portraits from individuals, whole communities, classes, and families.
Many sent with their submissions letters showing a strong desire to share
personal stories.

Word of mouth also
contributed to the success of the exhibition, and submissions started to pour
in not only from across Canada, but also from other countries such as Italy,
Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Holland,
India, Switzerland, France, and Australia. By December 2006, 17,000 portraits
had come in. The range of responses was vast - from all ages, levels of
ability, and types of communities. The images too reflected an enormous amount
of creativity, effort and thought, and the humor, honesty, and ingenuity were
moving.

As promised, all the
works submitted by December 1, 2006 that met the original criteria were
exhibited. The portraits were installed in prime exhibition space at the AGO
and had to be hung floor to ceiling to accommodate as many submissions as possible.
During the course of the exhibition, visitors dropped into the space during
gallery hours to create portraits to add to the collection. Visits, phone
inquiries, and e-mails continued for months; the exhibition’s run was
eventually extended and it had to be re-installed twice in order to respond to
the level of interest.

Why the Appeal?

What was it that
made this very straightforward exhibition so successful? Perhaps one reason is
that In Your Face tapped
into universal creativity as well as the usually unrealized potential of
museums to function as catalytic agents. Indeed, much of the creativity that
occurred around In Your Face happened off-site and in non-urban communities. Group submissions were frequent
and contained the work of families, neighbours, schools, workplaces, lunch
groups, and other community groups. For example, a package of 23 portraits of
various adults and children arrived with the following letter:

Dear
Folk at the Art Gallery of Ontario,

Please
accept the enclosed portraits for display in “In Your Face”. We are members and friends of the
Middle Road Community, an intentional community in rural Nelson, B.C. We had
lots of fun working together to create these pictures. Thanks for your support
of art and for sharing/spreading the word . . . art is for everyone, art is in
everyone.

Within the
exhibition itself, visitors to In Your Face were also able to make portraits at drawing
stations and and could then leave them behind to be installed. Many visitors
also photographed one another in the space, often holding up their portraits or
pointing to mounted portraits they had previously submitted. In this way the
exhibition became a social space bringing life to the institution and
transmitting the life of the institution back out into the community. As an
example of this, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Toronto chose to partner with the
AGO to raise awareness for their after-school, weekend, and summer programs. In
celebration of Boys and Girls Club Week they held a media event in the
exhibition, during which the AGO’s director, Matthew Teitelbaum, said: “I think
the challenge with a big institution is it seems elitist. This project says,
‘You belong here. This is your place.’ ”

Honouring a Genuine Response

Internally, at the
AGO, In Your Face definitely gave pause for reflection at a time when the Gallery was undergoing
significant change. Transformation AGO was not only physical, but conceptual as
well, and led to a re-imagining of the Gallery’s mandate and vision. The
Transformation AGO project created a space within which to question the values
of the institution as well as the traditional ways of working - questions that
needed to be asked in order to move the organization from traditional modes of
working to more dynamic, contemporary practices. In Your Face has proved to be crucial to this process as it
provided an opportunity to see the faces, and hear the stories, of some of the
people to whom the gallery really matters.

As In Your Face evolved, it was necessary for the AGO to
become more agile than usual in order to accommodate new work within the
exhibition and to respond to public inquiries. Though challenging, somehow this
need for increased flexibility, coupled with the open-endedness of the project,
enlivened the institution and kept the exhibition in play for much longer than
anticipated. The portraits contained within In Your Face also noticeably reflected far more diversity
than is usually seen at the AGO, either on the walls or among visitors. Given
the fact that Toronto is such a multicultural city, this proved to be an
evolutionary step for the institution. Multicultural representation remains a
deficiency that continues to be addressed. It is worth noting, however, that on
several occasions school children from diverse backgrounds visiting the
exhibition were able to point to portraits and say: “That looks like me.” That
level of recognition and relevance is essential for inclusion, and In Your
Face has helped to prove that
museums and galleries can play a role in forging identity, a process that has
to begin by honouring the value of the individual.

For museums and
galleries, achieving social inclusion means actively seeking out and removing
barriers to participation. In choosing to program open-ended projects like In
Your Face, public institutions
can go a long way toward becoming relevant and inclusive. People enjoy being
creative and want to explore their own creativity as well as the creativity of
others in ways that are accessible, attainable, and engaging. If the museum can
act as a catalyst for creativity - and the thousands of people who have
participated in In Your Face have shown that it can - then what will happen if we allow our walls to become
more permeable?

Extending the Experience: In
Your Face and Flickr

While the In Your Face exhibition was being developed at the AGO, gallery
staff suggested that it would be interesting to open up the call for submission
by creating a parallel project on the Web site Flickr. The idea proposed,
inspired by similar work done at the Brooklyn Museum (http://brooklynmuseum.org/),
was that Flickr could be used as a framework within which to solicit virtual
contributions that could also be featured as part of In Your Face, but in the form of
a digital slide show that would be incorporated into the gallery space.

The AGO decided not to proceed with integrating Flickr for this project
primarily due to concerns regarding copyright, the public display of content
that would be submitted on-line, and the corporate use of a Web site that is
clearly intended for personal use only. The AGO did, however, create a Flickr group that made reference to the
exhibition and invited users to share their creativity on-line within that
context of the Web site itself (http://www.flickr.com/groups/artmatters/).

Although it was not possible to create a direct link between In Your
Face and Flickr, the experiment did generate valuable experience in relation to
social networking and has helped to inform the development of other ideas and
projects at the AGO. It also demonstrated that these initiatives are relevant,
evidenced by the fact that the In Your Face – Portraits
group on Flickr still exists and continues to grow nearly two years after it
was created. Some of the other conclusions that have been drawn from this
experiment include:

When audiences see themselves reflected in a
collection, they can remain engaged over a long period of time. The In Your
Face - Portraits group on
Flickr currently features close to 10,000 photos contributed by over 900
members and continues to grow every day.

Active Flickr users submit their photos to
multiple groups. People’s interests are naturally diverse and the relationship
between groups is fertile territory for exploration.

There is a small group of very active Flickr
users. The most active members of the In Your Face – Portraits group have submitted over
150 images each. Viewed over the long term, however, they have not dominated
the content.

The right idea well positioned will attract
people’s attention. People are naturally attracted to content that is relevant
and meaningful to them and will remain involved if it is presented in a way
that is accessible, inviting and social.

There
is impact in numbers. People like to be part of something that is bigger than
themselves. The fact that the In Your Face – Portraits group on Flickr features nearly 10,000 photos presented
within the context of hundreds of million more photos is compelling.

In response to the
Transformation AGO project, and out of a desire to assess the potential of
projects like In Your Face,
the AGO has invested more energy in community consultation to help ensure that
the Gallery’s collection and program better reflect the needs of existing and
future audiences. At a session, a young participant offered the following
observation: “Art is social”. This comment has the potential to become a museum
maxim that reverberates across programming areas. Museums and galleries have
always been social spaces, but the explosion of social media demonstrates both
a hunger for connectedness as well as a desire to see creativity itself
fostered in a way that builds a sense of community and belonging.

The Actual and the Virtual: In
Your Face and
Collection X

While In Your Face kept evolving and growing, the AGO was also in the
process of developing its own experiment in social media through the creation
of an on-line initiative called Collection X (http://www.collectionx.museum). Launched in April 2007, Collection X represents
a programming and delivery approach that is purposely designed to challenge
some of the fundamental practices of museums and galleries. As with In Your
Face, Collection X provides a
space within which to share user-generated content, but it takes this concept
even further by inviting users to curate and interpret their own content using
a range of Web 2.0 technologies and concepts such as self-publishing and
tagging.

In relation to In Your Face, what Collection X offered was an opportunity to
weave together selected portraits from the exhibition, along with a variety of
installation shots, to create a virtual version of the exhibition. However,
this on-line presentation of In Your Face through Collection X represents more
than just a digital document of the original exhibition. In fact, it places it
within the larger context of social media, creating an opportunity for an
on-line audience not only to learn about In Your Face, but also, potentially,
to expand upon the original exhibition by adding additional content or perhaps
even creating their own parallel exhibitions to explore similar themes.

Fig 6: In Your Face, Screen shot, Collection X.

Structurally,
Collection X is built around the relationships among three main elements: collect, connect and create.
Within this structure ‘collect’ and ‘create’ function as headings that
represent traditional museum practices, including collection building at one
end of the spectrum and the creation of knowledge and meaning through research
and interpretation at the other. The heading ‘connect’ literally provides the
link between these two practices by inviting users to create on-line
exhibitions and connections that are personally meaningful and relevant, using
the content that is made available through Collection X.

In order to generate
interest and model the kind of content that can be created using Collection X,
the AGO worked with various project partners to seed content that includes
images, video and audio and to create a range of on-line collections,
exhibitions and connections. Collection X was also developed in tandem with
another AGO initiative called ArtsAccess that was designed to bring together artists, community members and cultural
organizations through art, art making and arts education. Together, Collection
X and ArtsAccess were meant to
foster creativity within a wider sphere, to encourage broader participation and
to build relationships through a combination of on-line and community-based
experiences.

For the AGO,
Collection X represents a major leap forward in terms of program development
and delivery on two fronts:

it provides an opportunity to activate public
collections by making them available in new and interesting ways, and

it makes it possible for
the public at large to upload their own collections and create virtual
exhibitions using the same application.

As a result,
Collection X functions as what has been described as an ‘open-source museum’
that enables users to emulate museum practices while, at the same time, drawing
upon a mix of content taken from public collections as well as from collections
created by the public.

Collection X
provides users with multiple points of entry and levels of engagement. They
can:

Search and browse images, videos and audio
clips

Contribute content in the form of images, video
and audio

Create exhibitions using public collections and
collections contributed by the public

Connect exhibitions together around themes,
issues or ideas to create connections

Use tags to describe and identify all levels of
content

Share thoughts and engage in dialogue through
comments and e-mail exchanges

Subscribe to RSS feeds and podcasts to track
new content

RSS feeds are
integral to the design of Collection X as they provide a way to keep users
connected to content that is constantly changing. The decision to use them was
based on the realization that people need tools to help them sort through the
vast amount of content that exists on-line. They also help to address the issue
of motivation by delivering prompts to users who are subscribers when the
content changes. Within Collection X, RSS feeds give users the ability to
subscribe to any thread of content on the site - tags, exhibitions, searches,
collections, user profiles - and to receive live updates using an RSS reader.
The integration of RSS feeds also means that new content can be distributed and
accessed through a variety of platforms and content personalization
applications.

What a comparison of In Your Face and Collection X reveals are
strategies that can be used to encourage creativity and engagement, even when
the intended audience is quite different. Included among the strategies that
have proven to be effective are the following:

establish structures and frameworks that are open and inclusive;

foster creativity without being prescriptive;

be democratic and ensure that the processes are non-hierarchical;

engage in dialogue and nurture relationships;

encourage a layering of voices and a plurality of content;

embrace a multiplicity of potential outcomes; and

honour the collaboration.

Based on the examples of In Your Face and Collection X,
AGO has found that these kinds of endeavors can succeed if the idea being
explored is authentic and engaging, the process is transparent, the structure
is flexible and the outcome is open-ended. For public galleries in particular,
such an approach has the potential to result in an expanded definition of art
as well as the emergence of a new kind of aesthetic that is rooted in the
authenticity of the experience, a critical mass of creative content and a
willingness to allow the work to assert its unique identity. It is critical
that these conditions exist so that the participants are able to see their knowledge,
creativity and experience reflected back in ways that are meaningful and
respectful.

Museums in Partnership: In Your
Face and the Portrait
Gallery of Canada

The Portrait Gallery of Canada, a programme of Library and Archives Canada,
is part history museum and part art gallery. The Portrait Gallery's active
program of traveling exhibitions, educational initiatives and community
partnerships brings a unique collection of more than four million paintings,
prints, drawings, sculptures, photographs, films and caricatures to all
Canadians.

Faces from the past and present, known and unknown, tell the story of
Canada, while contemporary works explore today's issues. To broaden and deepen
the Canadian experience, the Portrait Gallery is forming partnerships with
other cultural institutions nationally and internationally. The faces and
voices of past generations influence and inform Canadians today. The Portrait
Gallery of Canada's mission is to honour, commemorate and celebrate those who
have shaped this country, while redefining "portrait" for a new
century.

Library and Archives Canada developed the National Portrait Collection
based on works amassed since the 1880s, with the goal of documenting historical
personalities important to Canada's development. In November 2007, The Government of Canada launched a Request for
Proposals (RFP) to locate the Portrait Gallery of Canada in one of the
following cities: Halifax, Québec city, Montréal, Ottawa-Gatineau (National
Capital Region), Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver. The RFP
advertisement is closing April 16, 2008.

In early spring of
2007, representatives from the Portrait Gallery of Canada (PGC) met with
colleagues at the AGO to discuss collaborative opportunities. Over the course
of this meeting the institutions also expressed their respective challenges -
the AGO’s challenge to continue to make In Your Face available during a period of renovation, and
the PGC’s challenge to initiate real-time programming in the absence of a
permanent building.

Back at Library and
Archives Canada, PGC management approved the partnership. Staff secured an
unused exhibition space and worked closely with the AGO and colleagues at
Library and Archives Canada. They also initiated a great relationship with
Wallack’s, who generously sponsored art supplies and frames for the exhibition
space (a model inspired by the AGO).

On October 29, 2007,
the PGC launched its first exhibition in Canada: an exhibition organized by the
AGO, featuring approximately twelve thousand portraits submitted by the public.
Portrait submissions continued to
be accepted on-site. Over 100 people attended on opening night; kids were
making portraits; adults enjoyed portrait-tini’s; Canterbury Art Students
provided a live portraiture demonstration; the podium was set aside and
replaced by a television-inspired talk show format; three giant puppets greeted
the crowd in the exhibition; and some great Canadian tunes had people moving
about.

From November 2007 until June 2008, twice a
week, two classrooms (grades 4-12) visit In Your Face and experience educator-led curriculum
programming. Information about our programming was shared with teachers through
a collaboration with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the
Ottawa-Carleton School Board.

Examples of public programming include Video
Portrait Mosaics, Eat Me, Valentine! and Portraiture 101. A self-portrait on a
cake required an extra dose of creativity. Elizabeth-Todd Doyle, Curator
Education, collaborated with the Billing’s Estate Museum and the Nepean Museum
to welcome our programming into their space and into their community

Guided Tours of the exhibition were added in
the New Year. The tours have increased the reach and helped to identify new
publics such as English as a Second Language

Two teacher events allowed the sharing of
techniques and new ideas for using portraits in the classroom

New Media Programming enhances and shares the
experience through on-line exhibitions, news items, capturing and editing
image, video and audio content for presentation onto the PGC Web site

The exhibition has
been extended from March until September 1, 2008. Programming is currently in
the works to accompany the duration of the exhibition. Coming this summer,
Canadians will be able to contribute their portraits on-line through a simple
service enhanced with an exhibition feature. The AGO and the In Your Face exhibition have clearly enabled the PGC to
initiate programming. The catalyst that pushed PGC programming was the ability
to see beyond a building. The museum is not the building. PGC staff are working
on the foundation of the museum by challenging the interpretation of space and
programming, both physical and virtual. Their commitment to reach out to a
national audience remains at the forefront by proudly defining themselves as a
gallery without walls.

The In Your Face exhibition has proven to be an energizing
experience for both PGC and Library and Archives Canada. In Your Face is already being referred to as a model of
public engagement and collaboration. Between this exhibition and other projects
currently underway, it is challenging to take some time to reflect and share
lessons learned and to explore ways to sustain this energy. Still to be
addressed at the PGC is the question of what to do with portraits that the
public has shared and entrusted to the Gallery. This type of engagement creates
expectations on the part of contributors. Are the portraits to be acquired into
the collection and cared for; made available as a study collection; digitized
and made available on-line? Exploring ways to answers these questions will help
to inform how the PGC will continue to engage with Canadians and how Canadians
will choose to engage with us.

Questions Asked and Lessons
Learned

What happens when
public institutions like the AGO and the PGC function more as catalytic agents
and increasingly relinquish control? What if, instead of positioning ourselves
as gatekeepers, experts and judges, we strive to establish ways of working that
are inclusive and that honour creativity in a broad range of forms?

The overwhelming
response to In Your Face,
in all its manifestations, would seem to offer one possible answer. Starting
out as the seed of an idea, it took on a life of its own grew into something
bigger than ever could have been imagined. It gathered momentum drawing on the
strengths of the institution and the public and, along the way, captured the
imagination of both. This strength was rooted in community collaboration,
collective forms of creativity and a shared sense of ownership that
demonstrates what can happen when institutions and the public work together as
both producers and consumers of culture.

Within this context
many other questions are being asked, including, “How do public institutions
maintain standards of excellence while, at the same time, achieving accessibility?”
At the AGO there has been a conscious shift toward a more balanced approach
from ‘curatorial expertise is paramount’ to ‘visitor experience is paramount’.
In order to achieve this balance, and in order to assist all areas of the
gallery to share in this vision, a set of guiding principles have been
developed to direct the work of the institution; they include relevance,
responsiveness, creativity, transparency, diversity and forum.

As another element
of the Transformation AGO project, all decisions regarding exhibitions,
acquisitions, interpretive strategies and educational programs are now being
made based on these guiding principles. Not surprisingly, such a move has
prompted endless debate and discussion within the institution, a healthy sign
of movement towards a more democratic process. Questions of quality and voice
are still being argued, but, in order to remain relevant, institutions must pay
attention to what is happening within the larger culture or risk being left
behind.

Is it possible that, by functioning in a democratic way, museum standards may actually improve? As museums become more relevant to broader audiences, and include a multiplicity of voices and art forms from a mix of cultures and communities, what will emerge is much livelier and harder to define bodies of knowledge and expression around which to curate and program. The resulting juxtapositions, debates and discussions will keep museums alert, flexible and accountable. Within this new kind of museum environment expertise will be drawn from many different places and disciplines.

In developing
strategies to encourage creativity, engagement, and investment when the museum
is off-line, public institutions like the AGO and the PGC have found ways to be
more creative in their approach. As part of this process, it makes sense to
engage more fully with the kind of practices that have proven to be so
successful within the world of social media and social networking. As museums
and galleries evolve (as they must), the need to embrace a multiplicity of
voices will continue, as will the
need to surrender institutional authority and control. As challenging as this
proposition continues to be, it is also exciting, and provides perhaps the only
strategy that will work if museums and galleries are to succeed at fostering
new levels of audience engagement, public involvement and professional
partnerships.

Acknowledgments

The Art
Gallery of Ontario gratefully acknowledges the financial investment by the
Department of Canadian Heritage in the creation of Collection X, an on-line
presentation for the Virtual Museum of Canada.